Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo. President of the DR Congo. Remember the name. A century from now, historians will look back to these times and shake their heads, in wonder, every time they see this man’s name. They will think what a bad aberration it was that, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, a man like this – someone that embodied all the worst traits of the worst men to have ruled on this continent – could still ascend to become head of state in Africa. Some will put matters in perspective and reason that even well into the twenty-first Africa was hardly out of the woods anyway. The historians will remark that there still were a handful of bad apples; holdovers from the times when crises of self-governance were at their nadir on the continent, in the years after the wave of independence swept across Africa in the early 60s. The future researcher will point out that even in these times (today, well into the twenty-first century), there still were one or two individuals that, like during the worst of the bad old days, resorted to shooting up their countries’ cities or laying siege to entire countrysides, so as to take power, or entrench themselves. Heck, even now there still are army men toppling their governments by coup d’état. Yet now neither the image of the cartoon villain military man, in beret and dark goggles, terrorizing everyone before him (or riding in adulation to crowds mostly of his tribesmen), nor that of the wizened, venal octogenarian life president wielding a fly-whisk (or donning a leopard hat) while presiding over economic ruin, are what one imagines when we think of the African politician. These are largely things of the past. Today the image of the African head of state or politician that’s slowly emerged over the past few decades is one of a smart, forward-looking, IT-savvy man (or woman) that talks matters such as the need for Africa to be integrated into the international trade system; or that holds forth on the need to add value to our raw materials before exporting them overseas; or that talks intelligently about the need to ease intra-African travel, removing bottlenecks like visas for fellow Africans the better to ease movements and goods. And so on. Africa has changed. Even the military men that recently have been taking power through coups aren’t like the ruffians of old; fellows that overran public buildings, seized airports and held everyone hostage, staged public executions of the predecessors they had overthrown, as well any member of their government that they could apprehend, rounded up for mass incarceration those they hated, and generally sowed terror. Far from it. Even these men (the modern-day putschists in Africa) take great care to tamp down on acts that might create an environment of terror. While executing no one, they speak the language of their countries taking a bigger share of the value of national resources that hitherto have been going to Europe, and elsewhere in the West. They talk about economic development, employment opportunities for the youth, reform, and so on. They aren’t perfect men, but they aren’t fools. And then you have people like Tshisekedi of the DR Congo (In that category add Tshisekedi’s sidekick Evariste Ndayishimiye of Burundi, with whom he has so much in common). Felix Tshisekedi Tshilombo is a strange spaceman; a man whose political character is more suitable to a bygone era; one that Africans of a certain age should only remember in bad dreams. The fellow is a tribalist that places his Luba people everywhere into the machinery of state – as if there are other qualified Congolese – while mounting a campaign of mass murder against one ethnicity, the Tutsi of eastern DR Congo that he’s chosen as a scapegoat for all the problems he creates. The ruler of the DR Congo is a glutton, a hyper-greedy money grabber busy looting his country blind, selling mineral concessions from his state house to pale foreigners who dispense kickbacks in the form of suitcases-full of dollars and other foreign currencies. According to more than a few reports, the man assigns henchmen, or his grown children, to carry out all sorts of under-handed dealings, robbing his country’s children of their very future, but has a ready scapegoat. We are talking of none other than Rwanda, which the Tshisekedi regime daily accuses, with nothing but smears and slanders, that it’s “looting Congo”. The fellow cares nothing, zilch, about diplomacy and good neighborliness, because he depends on that enmity which he sells to the most gullible of his citizenry, as the source of all their problems. Tshilombo is so incompetent that every right-thinking African should be mad at because among other things he turns Africa into a laughingstock. Which other leader for instance still invites European mercenaries to shoot fellow Africans, or that turns said European mercenaries into his bodyguards? Other than being an embarrassment, he is a danger to every good thing modern Africa wants to achieve. Africans are far better than this, and should be more vocal about it.
